By Chris Cotter 

In May 2016, I took a short flight from Edinburgh to Belfast to sing in a farewell concert for my secondary school’s retiring Head of Music. It was quite an emotionally charged evening and, fittingly, the final piece on the programme was an arrangement of “Anthem” from the musical Chess. The final lines of the song run as follows:

“Let man’s petty nations tear themselves apart

My land’s only borders lie around my heart “

(Rice, Andersson, and Ulvaeus 1986: 64)

Before we sang, my former teacher suggested—perhaps joking, perhaps not—that this should really be “our” national anthem (whatever “our” might mean in a Northern Irish context), rather than the rather uninspiring God Save the Queen (now “King”). In a place as politically and culturally layered as Northern Ireland, that comment carried weight. It also stuck with me.

In this post – which is a blogified version of Cotter (2017) – I’ll attempt to unpack that moment and reflect upon the notion of identity: how we construct it, perform it, and shift it depending on context. I’ll return to Anthem (the final eight words of which I now have tattooed on my forearm) after I have offered some reflections on my memories of growing up Northern Irish, living in Scotland, and learning—slowly—that identity is never quite as fixed as we might think.

History and Memory

I don’t remember really learning much, if any, Northern Irish history at school. I could tell you about the Great Famine, and I could say a bit about the First World War, but beyond that, my formal education feels oddly silent. Given Northern Ireland’s complex and often painful past, that silence feels significant. I now suspect that this wasn’t accidental. Teaching recent, politically sensitive history is difficult, especially in a divided society. And maybe my parents were keen to keep sectarianism at arm’s length and didn’t go out of their way to fill in those gaps at home either. However, this remembered absence is worth reflecting on, especially when I think about just how present sectarian divisions were in my everyday life.

I grew up in the 1990s in what I’d describe now as a middle-class Protestant (Church of Ireland) household. And like many Northern Irish people of my age, I was aware of “the Troubles,” even if I didn’t fully understand them. I knew about the violence. The murders, the bombs, the annual tensions around marching season. I remember the visual markers such as flags and painted kerbstones which marked different territories. And I remembering being puzzled that so many of my primary school classmates supported Glasgow Rangers (the ‘Protestant’ team) when I didn’t think Scottish football was that good (sorry!), and being teased for supporting the supposedly ‘Catholic’ Manchester United.

More positively, the cul-de-sac we moved to in the mid-90s was roughly half Catholic, half Protestant, and I don’t remember this fact causing any issues. Far from it. However, importantly, this information was still known, even if not really mentioned, and we also learned to be careful with using certain friends’ ‘Irish’ names when we crossed the bridge to go to the shop in the nearby ‘loyalist’ estate.

Looking back, I have to acknowledge that these memories aren’t neutral snapshots of the past. They’re shaped by who I am now: someone who likes to think he’s a bit more “above” sectarian divisions; someone who has gone on to specialize in Religious Studies and even authored some materials on Northern Ireland for OU’s new module – DA332: Religion and Global Challenges in the Past and Present– which has just finished its first presentation.

Did school actually avoid Northern Irish history, or have I just forgotten it? Were my classmates consciously expressing (their parents’) religious or political identities through football, or am I projecting that on to them? What I can say is that identity mattered, even when I didn’t fully grasp why, and I had my own tactics for navigating it.

Two Flags, One Photo

A wonderful illustration of this comes from another memory of a 2003 family holiday in Normandy. The owner of the holiday home we were staying in had a quirky habit where she would fly the national flag of whoever was staying in the cottage from a flagpole in the garden. Misunderstanding our “Northern Irish” identity, she first raised the Republic of Ireland flag and then, upon realising her ‘mistake’, she added the Union flag below it on the same pole.

For what might have been the first time in my life, I saw those two flags – each of which I associated with violence, bigotry and claims to territory – flying together. So, I took a photo. And, as many teenagers did at the time, I immediately set this quirky image as my MSN Messenger profile picture when we returned home.

Not everyone appreciated the symbolism as much as I did, and I can remember a ‘friend’ almost instantly berating me for displaying it, stating that she would rather die than see the Union flag flying beneath the “tricolour”. I asked why this bothered her so much, and she said that this display was offensive to her “religion”, which was “Protestant,” as she put it. I pushed back, questioning what she meant, especially when she admitted she didn’t attend church. In my mind, I had “won” the argument. Much like I had decided that my classmates didn’t “really” support Rangers, I decided that she wasn’t a “real” Protestant but was just someone using the label as an alternative to “loyalist”.

Looking back now with my Religious Studies hat on, I can see that I fell right into the trap of what Aaron Hughes calls the rhetoric of authenticity (Hughes 2015: xv). This rhetoric dominates in much public discourse about religion, where “the operative assumption seems to be that ‘religion’ or a ‘religious tradition’ must be essentially good and just, and, a priori, anything that is bad or unjust must therefore be an aberration of religion” (Martin 2010: 3).  I thought I knew what Protestantism “really” meant. I thought I was above the politics. But, of course, I now know I was playing the same game, but from a different standpoint. As my doctoral supervisor, Kim Knott (2005: 125), has argued, ‘there is no “bird’s eye view”’ from which ‘we’ can study religion (or, indeed, many other social categories).

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By Dr Katelin Teller 

On 18 March, I took the lead with the OU Religious Studies team, John Maiden, Stefanie Sinclair and John Wolffe to join forces with Sharon Booth from the NGO Solutions Not Sides (SNS) to cohost a one-day conference on ‘Peace education and creative engagement’ at the Pears Foundation in London. Bringing together 30 policy specialists, teachers, researchers, curriculum experts and NGO practitioners, the event aimed to tackle a pressing question: How can peace education be more deeply and meaningfully integrated into UK schools?  At a time of geopolitical tension and rising misinformation, this conversation could not be more urgent. Ongoing curriculum reforms in England, Wales, Scotland, and now a landmark Supreme Court decision in Northern Ireland calling aspects of current RE provision there “unlawful”, provide important opportunity to incorporate the development of peacebuilding skills into school education.

The NGO SNS, founded in 2019, has long been known for its courageous work bringing young Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders into UK schools. Through direct, personal storytelling, it helps pupils grapple with polarised and emotionally charged topics while countering both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate.

This conference was a chance to build synergy across these efforts, draw on diverse expertise, and imagine what a more peace-‑literate educational system might look like.

Session 1, chaired by Prof. John Wolffe, OU, examined the rapidly evolving policy environment around peace, citizenship and RE.

• Naomi Byrne (Educate Against Hate, DfE) highlighted how government resources, including the educate.against.hate website, aim to help schools safeguard against radicalisation and build resilience to extremism.
• Dr Jeremy Hayward (UCL) explored the challenge of confronting conspiracy theories and disinformation in the classroom; an issue increasingly intertwined with misogynistic online content influencing students’ attitudes.
• Dr Stefanie Sinclair (OU Religious Studies) argued that the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment review, and current efforts to include RE in the national curriculum in England in particular, are an important opportunity to ensure that education in schools supports young people to:
  • develop peacebuilding and communication skills
  • build media and digital literacy
  • recognise and challenge stereotypes and misinformation
  • explore religious history, including local contexts
  • connect local issues to global complexities
  • learn with and from one another
  • engage safely and creatively with lived experiences of diversity.

The overall message was clear: peace education is not an add‑on, it’s foundational to preparing young people for the world they inhabit.

Session 2, chaired by Dr Sinclair, OU, brought together Prof. John Wolffe (OU) and SNS Director Sharon Booth to reflect on practical methodologies for peace education.

John Wolffe introduced the international RETOPEA project, which  aims to broaden young people’s understanding of religious toleration and peace, both in history and in contemporary society. The Open University has developed a method where young people create short documentary-style films by engaging with brief historical sources and then collaborating in small groups to make their own ‘Docutubes’. This hands-on, collaborative process not only deepens their engagement with the subject matter but also helps develop key skills such as teamwork, empathy, curiosity and imagination as well as communication and digital literacy skills.

Sharon also introduced the SNS Peace Model Handbook, a resource designed to strengthen social unity and citizen empowerment, highlighting practical tools that educators can implement now. The PEACE Model is SNS’s five-step peace education methodology – Participate, Equip, Apply, Create, Enact – that guides young people from embracing a win-win mindset and building social-emotional skills, through structured dialogue and human needs-based problem solving, to active citizenship and real-world peacebuilding action.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Both RETOPEA and SNS offer innovative ways for young people to encounter and interpret narratives of peace. Their insights underscored the value of combining historical perspective with lived experience, and the importance of safe, structured pedagogy when addressing conflict.

I chaired the third session which shifted the focus inward, exploring the psychological dimensions that underpin peace education.

• Dr Smadar Cohen Chen (Sussex University) offered a compelling exploration of hope, its role in conflict resolution and its relevance for the classroom.
• Elizabeth Yeomans (John Moores University) examined how trauma shapes learning and argued for a trauma-informed pedagogical approach that recognises the emotional landscapes young people bring into school.

Both talks reinforced the idea that peace education is not just intellectual but is also deeply emotional and relational.

In Session 4, chaired by SNS Director Sharon Booth, teachers Ruairi Geehan (St Dominic’s Grammar, Belfast) and Sarah Macpherson (LAE Stratford) shared experiences from their own classrooms.  Their reflections showed the transformative power of school‑based peace workshops in their schools and emphasised the importance of local partnerships between schools, reminding us that peacebuilding often begins with simple acts of connection.

The final session, chaired by Dr John Maiden, OU, invited participants to reflect on four key questions:

1. How can we embed peace education within RE, History, PSHE and Citizenship?
2. How can we communicate and collaborate more effectively?
3. What can each organisation meaningfully contribute?
4. Should we form a coalition, and would you join it?

The response was a resounding yes.  Participants expressed a strong desire to form a coalition of practitioners, academics, policymakers, and curriculum specialists to jointly advance peace education across the UK.

Feedback gathered from the day will now help determine the first steps toward making that coalition and its collective vision a reality.

Join Us as We Continue This Work

If your work engages with peace education pedagogies, we warmly invite you to be part of this growing community of practice.

Please contact [email protected] to get in touch with us.

Suzanne Newcombe and Karen O’Brien-Kop

Clashes of truth claims in global public health are on the rise. From US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s policy assaults on vaccine science[1] to the highest measles outbreak in England for more than a decade,[2] stories of health science scepticism often have roots in minoritised groups and can include religious reasoning of different kinds. Meanwhile the global ‘complementary and alternative medicine market’ continues to grow, estimated at USD 193.36 billion in 2025,[3] providing health treatments that are often derived from, or which support, traditional religious or spiritual worldviews.

Exploring how health and wellbeing decisions are always part of a multi-layered process, Religion, Spirituality and Public Health: Competing and Complementary Epistemes challenges assumptions of ‘culture wars’ between biomedicine and ‘alternatives’ and between biomedical scientific thinking and religious or ‘traditional’ ontologies. Real-life decisions are made not solely in reference to biomedical epistemes, but also systems of embodied rationality, systems of reasoning and negotiations with power and authority that can be understood and articulated as rational while also experiential. This book uses the tragic global crisis of Covid-19 to interrogate fundamental questions about how we can better handle personal and collective public health decisions. It explores the way the religious and scientific spheres of human activity can be understood as irreducibly connected and implicated in many decisions about health and wellbeing on both the individual and public policy levels.

Each chapter attempts to meet specific communities on their own terms, resisting the essentialising and belittling encounters more commonly found between public health and religion. The editors highlight a series of global case studies, exploring in depth the way pragmatic, pluralistic decisions were made within the context of apparently incompatible ontologies (e.g. Gods, ancestors, spirits, biomedical interventions and traditional frameworks for promoting health). Case studies of public health policy are interrogated at national or state level for Iran and Tamil Nadu in India, while individual, pragmatic navigations of pluralistic realities are explored with case studies set in the NHS in Britain (Ugba), Korean musok (Sarfati) and Afro-Brazilian religiosity (Bahia).  Conversely, the potentially profound significance of ontological framing in health and healing is explored with reference to compliance with public health policy (Roussou; Deeley) and in the framings of increasingly popular ‘self-healing’ with psychedelics (Steavu).

Theoretical interventions include the development of a ‘Pluriversal Philosophy of Lived Religion’ (O’Brien-Kop) and rethinking epistemological assumptions about benchmarks, baselines and valid bases of truth. The volume questions the value of some of the standard assumptions of the biomedical episteme, including calling for a strong agnosticism about ontologies (Cheung) while maintaining focus on criteria of clinical efficacy, avoidance of harm, and more rigorously interrogating the experiential episteme of both patients and practitioners (Newcombe). Professor Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Fellow of the British Academy) concludes the volume by drawing attention to the way this volume contributes to a much-needed reworking of ‘the ecology of biomedicine through greater analytic as well as practical focuses on experiences of wellbeing’ (p. 277).

If we are going to design more inclusive policy and look at simple, practical ways to alleviate suffering, we must pay more attention to the pragmatic pluralities that more accurately describe how people navigate their life choices. And in relation to public health, we should also take seriously conspiracy-theorising as an epistemological act and system that is underpinned by persuasive reasoning and rationalities. Without understanding the functioning of such theorising, public health policy is weakened in its attempts to address the spread and appeal of counter-factual claims, particularly in minority or minoritized communities.

This book is a concentrated attempt to advance the conversation between biomedical science, religion and belief, as well as cultivate a more honest assessment about the types and value of specific knowledge-making practices that coexist in the contemporary world. This book offers a rich picture of multiple epistemic practices that are overlapping, touching, and sometimes sharply colliding. It invites us to consider more fully what a more radically plural, ontologically sensitive understanding of global society might encompass.

The book is available in print format and as open-access research in downloadable ePub/PDF format from Liverpool University Press (published 21 October 2025):

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781836245643

[1] JFK uses religious reasoning of different kinds to justify his views, include likening vaccine administration to children like sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church (NBC News 2024) https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/rfk-jr-vaccines-cdc-fascism-abuse-catholic-church-autism-conferences-rcna181605.

[2] In 2025 the England measles epidemiology report of the UK Health Security Agency stated: ‘In 2024 there were 2,911 laboratory confirmed measles cases in England, the highest number of cases recorded annually, since 2012.’ (UK Health Security Agency 2025) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/measles-epidemiology-2023/confirmed-cases-of-measles-in-england-by-month-age-region-and-upper-tier-local-authority-2025

[3] Precedence Research 2025, https://www.precedenceresearch.com/complementary-and-alternative-medicine-market

Cover photo: By Igreja Dimensão from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-wearing-facemask-on-the-ground-8044929/

By David Robertson

Deal or No Deal returned to our screens recently. If you haven’t seen it before, the format is extremely simple—there are 22 players, each being assigned a box filled with a random value between 1p and £100,000. One player is picked to take their box (and its unknown value) to the centre, where they begin to reveal the contents of the other players boxes, one by one. Every three boxes, the mysterious Banker phones in with an offer to buy the player’s still-unopened box, offers which can change dramatically as the values of the other boxes are slowly revealed. Essentially, the contestant must gamble the unknown value in their box against the Banker’s offers to gain the highest possible profit. However, to get the maximum possible – £100k – one must both have received the box of that value, and be prepared to go to the very end and say no to the Banker’s every offer along the way.

Originally hosted by Noel Edmonds, the show was relaunched in 2023 with Stephen Mulhern (who looks like an AI combined Ant, Dec and Philip Schofield into a single image). Edmonds has been a TV pioneer since the 1980s, innovating now-common techniques such as audience phone-ins, and, like Mulhern, cut his teeth presenting live children’s TV. It shows – each episode of Deal or No Deal is an hour of crowd-work, the host building a narrative from a random sequence of numbers and whatever the contestant happens to do and say. The narrative of each show is driven by the contestant being obliged to find patterns in a random sequence, and then explain their reasoning.

It’s that which makes the show so interesting as an example of how ordinary people understand knowledge. Traditional epistemologists (philosophers of knowledge) might approach the question in terms of what a contestant can know for certain, or what the optimal way to think the problem through is. However, I’m much more interested in the social epistemological questions about what everyday people do to try to gain knowledge, and what they think they are doing. Answering those might give us a rather different perspective on religious belief.

Any episode of the show is full of examples. The players are constantly getting a “feeling” about boxes. The contestant will often have a sense about whether their box contains a blue (low value) or red (high value) number. Sometimes they may have had a dream about it (perhaps understandable given that they may have in the pool of potential players for weeks before actually being picked). The contestant will also frequently ask other players if they have a feeling about its contents – and it’s very seldom that they will say no. I often wonder where they understand this knowledge as coming from – from themselves, or an external source? That it is typically described as a “feeling” makes it clear that this is sensed knowledge, rather than thought, experienced in the heart rather than the head. That it is often said with the palm of the hand laid against the chest reinforces this impression.

Another example is the sense that the player should “go all the way to the end” with the box they were given – as though there were some purposeful or meaningful connection between them and the contents of the box they were assigned. That they were somehow “chosen”, or that the value reflects themselves in some karmic way.

It’s increasingly common for contestants to talk about “manifesting” a particular result—that is, active visualisation toward a desired outcome. Although such magical thinking has a long history, it was repopularised by Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 bestseller The Secret. Noel Edmunds himself became a prominent advocate for these techniques, publishing his own book Positively Happy: Cosmic Ways to Change Your Life in 2006. It is certainly possible that he encouraged contestants to talk in this way, but nevertheless they have continued to do so with Mulhern.

The contestants will also frequently construct ad hoc rituals. These typically involve family members and friends – for example, certain boxes will be kept until the end because the numbers are a birthday of a sibling or child, or decisions are based on advice given in advance by a grandparent. Although this is often presented as “for luck”, I read it as being more about “meaning”. In many cases, they are people who’ve died, usually (but sadly not always) older people. By incorporating these ancestors in the narrative being constructed, the contestants establish their identity within a larger group of extended family and close friends, becoming a representative of the broader tribe for the purposes of the narrative.

We can see this socialised knowledge too in how the group will spontaneously respond to events in particular ways. One that fascinates me is the way that the collective will respond to a disappointing play (for example, the player revealing the locations of the high-value boxes early in the game) by all repeating “come on”, not in the cheery way of someone encouraging a child flagging in a sports day race, but in a quiet way that seems to mean something closer to “hold the line” or “trust the plan”. The contestant, being seen as the representative of the broader collective, is reassured by that broader collective about the unexpected result and encouraged to continue. I am reminded of Bruno Latour’s argument in Rejoicing that religion is a “mode of being” in which language is used not to carry information but to transform the person hearing it. It’s a collective shoring up of faith, in its most simple meaning of “trust”.

These ad hoc acts and improvised knowledge claims are very much in keeping with those described by scholars of vernacular religion including Leonard Primiano, Martin Stringer and Graham Harvey. For these scholars, our beliefs are not so much an idea that we hold in our head that drives our behaviour, rather they are socially-determined sets of responses to various situations, and in out-of-the-ordinary or stressful situations, our responses can be very different from our everyday responses. These often do not confirm to the kinds of logical or empirical thinking that traditional epistemology has presented as the norm, but they are nevertheless utterly normal, and I would argue, central to understanding human behaviour.

Deal or No Deal gives us an opportunity to observe these processes happening in a framework that isn’t seen as religious by anyone involved. While religious identity continues to drop steadily, non-empirical beliefs and their ritualised expressions remain ubiquitous. As scholars of religion, we could identify these claims to non-empirical knowledge as religious, but I am not sure what the analytical benefit would be. Rather, I prefer the more radical position that these non-empirical knowledges are not uniquely, or even particularly, the domain of religion. Dividing the ways we gain knowledge about the world into science on the one hand, and religion on the other, as we often do, is too simplistic.

The broader point then is that, outside of academia or other contexts where we are brought to consciousness of how we are thinking, our ways of gaining knowledge of the world are messy and complex. Deal or No Deal is perhaps something of an outlier, but I suspect that most of us have made a decision based on a feeling about a person, or object. Maybe you’ve had a physical reaction to a place, or felt that you were being watched. Ideas about ghosts, communication with the dead, of extra-sensory perception and of being able to will things into manifestation are as common, if not more so, than those we more typically identify as religion, and probably always have been. But as yet, we lack the vocabulary for a more nuanced conversation about different kinds of knowledge.

By Stefanie Sinclair

We’re at the cusp of potentially major changes in Religious Education in England. Last month, the Department for Education published the final independent report it commissioned on Building a World-Class Curriculum for All. This strongly recommends that Religious Education should be added to the national curriculum in England to address inconsistencies in the quality of the provision of RE and “prevent further diminishment” of this subject (Curriculum and Assessment Review, 2025, p. 109). Deborah Weston, Chair of the Religious Education Policy Unit for NATRE, the Religious Education Council and RE Today, has described this as “the most important opportunity for the subject in decades” (cited in Kahn-Daniels, 2025).

On the 9^th of December at 4.30pm, Deborah Weston will speak at a webinar on’ The Curriculum and Assessment Review and the future of Religious Education in England ‘. This free online event will be hosted by the BASR (British Association for the Study of Religions) and the Open University. It is open to anyone who would like to find out more about the report’s recommendations and their potential impact on the future of RE. In particular, the event will also explore how colleagues at universities and schools can work together to support next steps, join the conversation about future curriculum content and raise the status of the subject. Speakers will also include Rachael Jackson-Royal, Exams and Higher Education Officer at the National Association of Teachers of RE (NATRE) and Head of RE at a large multi-academy trust in Birmingham.

To find out more about this event and register, please click here:

REGISTRATION LINK

BASR webinar:

The Curriculum and Assessment Review and the future of Religious Education in England

9^th of December at 4.30-5.30pm

Background

Currently, RE is a basic, compulsory school subject. Its content is not nationally defined, but locally agreed, with independent SACREs (Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education) advising local authorities. The recent Curriculum and Assessment review acknowledges that it is “vital for children and young people to have access to high-quality RE” and stresses the subject’s “important role in children and young people’s intellectual, personal, spiritual, moral, social and cultural development” (Curriculum and Assessment Review, 2025, pp. 106-7). However, it concludes that while “there are undoubtedly pockets of excellent practice […], the evidence suggests that provision for RE in many schools is not good enough and does not prepare pupils adequately for life beyond school” (Curriculum and Assessment Review, 2025, p. 108). While RE remains popular at GCSE, despite not featuring in the EBacc, there are great inconsistencies in the quality of provision, exacerbated by critical shortages of RE subject specialist teachers. These conclusions very much resonate with those of the 2024 Ofsted subject report for RE in England (Ofsted, 2024).

There is widespread agreement across the sector that change is urgently needed. However, in its response to the recommendations of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, the government has stressed how essential it is that “a clear shared position from the sector on the future of RE” is established first (UK Government, 2025, p. 35). Previous attempts at reform (since 1988) did not manage to do so.

However, there are significant factors in place that make the achievement of a shared position a realistic prospect now. The report’s recommendation to add RE to the National Curriculum has been welcomed across the RE subject community, including the executive committees of NATRE, the Religious Education Council in England and Wales (REC) and the Association for University Lecturers in Religion and Education (AULRE) (see: AULRE, 2025; Kahn-Daniels, 2025; REC, 2025).

Furthermore, the REC has already developed a National Content Standard for RE in England (REC, 2023) which is explicitly mentioned in the final report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review as a good foundation for the establishment of a national curriculum for RE (Curriculum and Assessment Review, 2025, p. 109). As a next step, the government has tasked Vanessa Ogden, who led the ‘deep dive’ consultation for RE in the context of the Assessment and Curriculum Review, to set up and convene a task and finish group, aiming to co-create a draft national curriculum for RE by March 2026, building on the REC’s National Content Standard for RE.

If consensus on a draft can indeed be reached, next steps would involve the DfE conducting a formal consultation regarding the details of the content and proposed changes to the legislative framework. This would also include the review’s recommendation to repeal the current requirement that learners between the age of 16 and 18 study RE at school sixth forms.

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By Hugh Beattie

In November, New York for the first time ever elected a Muslim Mayor – Zohran Mamdani, who since 2020 has been a member of the New York state legislature. His background is a cosmopolitan one. His mother, Mira Nair, was brought up as a Hindu. She is an internationally-acclaimed Bollywood film director (her best-known film is probably Monsoon Wedding, released  in 2001). His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an academic who specializes in colonial, anti-colonial and decolonisation studies. His publications include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2005) which explores American attitudes to Islam. Mahmood Mamdani comes from a Khoja background. Khojas are members of a trading caste living mainly in western India, Pakistan, Uganda, Europe and the USA. Their ancestors became Muslims in the 14^th century CE; today the largest Khoja community is found in Bombay. Most Khojas identify with the minority Nizari Ismaili Muslim tradition, led by Aga Khan V, Shah Rahim al-Husayni. There are also Sunni and Twelver Shi’ite Khojas. Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda and has lived in New York since he was seven) identifies with the Twelver Shi’a Khoja tradition.

Khoja Islam has been characterised as flexible, diverse and tolerant. In many respects Zohran Mamdani’s approach seems to be a liberal one; for example he is a supporter of the LGBTQ+ Community, and  is a hip-hop fan who has composed, performed, and produced rap music. His views on Palestine and Israel, however, have attracted ‘criticism from across the political spectrum’ (Mays, 2025). While a student at Bowdoin College, he helped to found the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. He is also a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which uses non-violent means to try and pressure the Israeli government into recognising Palestinian rights. This has helped to make him a controversial figure who has been condemned by some as an anti-Semite, and accused of calling for the destruction of Israel. It is true that he has described Israel as an apartheid state, criticised American military support for it, and called for New York-based organisations funding Jewish settlements on the West Bank to lose their charitable status. Nevertheless he argues that ‘Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights’ for all its citizens, and he has challenged anti-Semitic views and said that, whatever their identity, the killing of civilians is always wrong. He criticised a rally held in New York on October 8 2023 which celebrated Hamas’s actions on October 7, and on the second anniversary of the attack said that on that day Hamas committed a ‘horrific war crime’ (Friedman and Bartov, 2025). During his mayoral campaign Mamdani reached out to New York’s million or so Jews, for example visiting synagogues and engaging with Jewish organisations. Some 30% of the Jewish electorate in the city voted for him (Demir, 2025).

Mamdani has also been accused of being anti-Hindu, mainly because he has been a critic of the Hindu nationalist Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, for what some have called Modi’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies. However, during his mayoral campaign Mamdani also tried to win the support of the substantial Hindu community in New York, for example visiting two Hindu temples during his campaign, and proclaiming that he was ‘proud of [his] … Hindu heritage’ (Dutt 2025). Many Hindus voted for him too.

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By Marion Bowman

Last week, during the Open University Graduation Ceremony at the Birmingham Symphony Hall on October 30, I had the enormous pleasure of delivering the Oration in honour of Steve Roud, after which our Chancellor, Baroness Martha Lane-Fox of Soho, presented him with the honorary degree of Doctor of the University.

The Open University has a noble tradition of awarding honorary degrees to individuals recognised for outstanding achievements aligned to the University’s values.  I have often been part of the platform party when we have presented an honorary degree, for instance to Martha Lane Fox in 2011 and to Terry Pratchett in 2013, so it was fascinating to actually participate in this process. Working with Steve’s daughter Kate Faulkner and his longterm academic collaborator Dr Julia Bishop (University of Sheffield), OU ethnomusicologist Professor Byron Dueck and I proposed Steve for the honorary degree; we were delighted that the nomination was successful.

Figure 1. Marion orating while Steve had to stand and listen! Photo by Leslie Currie (2025)

Figure 2. Steve responding to Oration and award. From the smiles, this was the moment he said ‘Indexers don’t get out much!’ Photo by Leslie Currie (2025)

So, what had Steve done to deserve this? Steve spent many years as local studies librarian in Croydon and also served as the honorary librarian of the Folklore Society. However, Steve Roud is best known as the creator of the Roud Indexes: an extraordinarily comprehensive record of traditional English-language folk songs from around the world. His passion for documenting and cataloguing the genre has transformed both scholarly research and popular understanding.

The Folk Song Index records key details of traditional songs in English, and features a comprehensive numbering system, called ‘Roud numbers’, to identify and bring together variants of songs across time and place. This is essential in a field where there are many different renditions of songs and no single, definitive version of them. For instance, clicking on Roud 12 in the Folk Song Index, Scarborough Fair, will take you to 355 entries detailing the song’s different titles and versions, and citing evidence of the song, and its performance, in myriad sources. In relation to Vernacular Religion, you can explore the index for references to ghosts, Wassailing, May Day and other calendar customs.

Because of its size and reach, the Index allows researchers to undertake comparative studies, chart song histories, investigate the role of women as performers, and many other aspects of vernacular culture. The Folk Song Index sits alongside Steve’s Broadside Index, which documents songs in cheap printed formats and early recordings, which are essential to understanding the sources and histories of vernacular song.

The Roud Indexes began life around 1970 on a series of index cards kept in a shoebox and were eventually transferred to Steve’s personal computer. More than 50 years later, there are over three quarters of a million entries, linking thousands of songs, from Australia to the Americas, as well as the British Isles. Today, the Roud Indexes are hosted online by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society and are available free of charge. They are an indispensable resource for researchers of all kinds around the world, utilised by academics, practitioners and enthusiasts alike.

Based on his extensive research, Steve has published widely on folk music, including Folk Song In England, a comprehensive history of the subject, highlighting the social context of the songs. With Julia Bishop, Steve created the award-winning New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. In recognition of his outstanding scholarship, Steve has received the Folklore Society’s Coote Lake Medal and has been elected an International Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

As I said in my Oration, the Roud Indexes are ground-breaking resources, democratic and scholarly, comprehensive and co-operative. This ethos resonates powerfully with our own belief at The Open University in the importance of making knowledge inclusive and accessible. It seemed entirely appropriate that the OU should honour Steve’s extraordinary contribution to the history of vernacular song and folk traditions.

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